Re: [PATCH 0/3] Use Doxygen and sphinx for html documentation

From: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
To: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>
Cc: Luca Fancellu <luca.fancellu@arm.com>,
	<xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org>, <bertrand.marquis@arm.com>,
	<wei.chen@arm.com>, George Dunlap <george.dunlap@citrix.com>,
	Ian Jackson <iwj@xenproject.org>, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>,
	Julien Grall <julien@xen.org>, Wei Liu <wl@xen.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Use Doxygen and sphinx for html documentation
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 12:15:56 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <51bce878-89a3-d940-f40d-bfde794a0f4f@citrix.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2104061418360.31460@sstabellini-ThinkPad-T480s>

On 06/04/2021 22:24, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Apr 2021, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>> On 06/04/2021 11:36, Luca Fancellu wrote:
>>> This serie introduce doxygen in the sphinx html docs generation.
>>> One benefit is to keep most of the documentation in the source
>>> files of xen so that it's more maintainable, on the other hand
>>> there are some limitation of doxygen that must be addressed
>>> modifying the current codebase (for example doxygen can't parse
>>> anonymous structure/union).
>>>
>>> To reproduce the documentation xen must be compiled because
>>> most of the headers are generated on compilation time from
>>> the makefiles.
>>>
>>> Here follows the steps to generate the sphinx html docs, some
>>> package may be required on your machine, everything is suggested
>>> by the autoconf script.
>>> Here I'm building the arm64 docs (the only introduced for now by
>>> this serie):
>>>
>>> ./configure
>>> make -C xen XEN_TARGET_ARCH="arm64" CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-" menuconfig
>>> make -C xen XEN_TARGET_ARCH="arm64" CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-"
>>> make -C docs XEN_TARGET_ARCH="arm64" sphinx-html
>>>
>>> now in docs/sphinx/html/ we have the generated docs starting
>>> from the index.html page.
>> Do you have a sample rendered output?
>>
>> The plan was to try and use Linux's kernel-doc plugin for Sphinx, which
>> is very doxygen-like.  Did you experiment with this option?
> As you probably know the end goal for Luca (and the Xen FuSa SIG as a
> whole) is to generate all FuSa documents, including requirements docs,
> interface docs, etc.
>
> FuSa requires us to follow the famous V model, where the high level
> requirements are linked to the lower level requirements, which are
> linked to the interface docs, which are linked all the way down to the
> code.
>
> Maintaining the linking is difficult and typically done with expensive
> proprietary FuSa tools.
>
> Fortunately, an engineer working with the Zephyr project developed a set
> of scripts for Doxygen that are able to generate the required FuSa docs
> and also links from in-code comments and markdown/rst docs in the tree.
>
> This is great work, and in the FuSa SIG we thought it would be best to
> align ourselves with Zephyr to be able to pull our efforts together on
> the tooling side instead of doing the same thing again on our own.
>
> This is the reason why we ended up with Doxygen.

So are we're saying that Doxygen is a hard dependency because there is
an extension for Doxygen to generate other safety docs?

~Andrew